Friday, March 27, 2009

My Best Friend Linux

Today I was setting up a cron job and suddenly realized - Linux has been such a good friend to me all these years and I never recognized this fact. This post is how Linux has stood by my side silently and quietly helped me do difficult things easily, has never once failed me, is always there when I wanted, does not require me to pay, teaches me cool tips & tricks and is a joy to talk with - what else can you expect from your best friend.

I will summarize some of the features I love linux for.

1. tail -f error.log

I use tail command a lot. Only Textpad in windows world has something equivalent of it and that too is a little jerky and with large log files Textpad becomes slow. Tell me if there is a better alternative to Textpad and Notepad++ ( should I have to always manually reload in Notepad++?).

2. crontab

Hats off to the geniuses behind crontab concept. Scheduling programs to run every minute to run on a particular day once a year - is so simple. Just by editing a text file you can schedule your programs to your needs.

3. CLI

I can do "anything" from the command line. It is much faster, can pipe actions, can script them and much more.

4. VI Editor

Navigation, search, replace - cannot be any simpler and faster. Emacs fans - I know you guys can get it done too - we are brothers here.

5. Permissions

Read, Write, Execute permissions - the first thing I learnt in Unix land and lets me sleep peacefully at night!

6. No License hassles

This is the biggest reason why I love linux. I can download it, burn it, install it in my machines and not worry about the license or legal issues. For a startup with a shoe string budget - this is a boon.

Of course there are numerous other benefits - lack of viruses, malware, great performance even in lowly hardware, ease of installing applications and countless others.